Evolution Stuff

Recently I was reading some Jack Chick tracts (hey, I was bored…), and I came across one of his tracts on evolution. It’s poorly done, but it provides some interesting insight. Among those it claims that Earnst Haeckel forged the drawings of human embryos with gill slits. I did a quick websearch on this and only found creationism sites…hmm…It also claims that:

-Lucy was a chimp
-All evidence of Peking Man being 500,000 years old is gone
-Neanderthal man was just a skeleton of a homo sapien who had bad arthritis
-There is no difference between Cro-Magnon man and homo sapiens

All of these sound bunk, but I’m just too lazy to do my own research. On a side note: Where was Neanderthal man found? I thought the Neander valley was in Germany, but at chick.com it says France…hmmm…

Link to Chick tract:
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0055/0055_01.asp

Start here:

talkorigins

Then make a quick perusal of the Great Debates forum. More information than you can shake a monkey at. Hey… what are you doing shaking the monkey when you should be reading!

Welcome to the boards! :slight_smile:

Rhythmdvl

Lucy was not a chimp and no reputable paleontoligist says she was.

Peking Man was the name first given to an example of an early homind found in China. During WWII, the bones were lost during shipment for safekeeping.
However, the species that Peking man represented (homo erectus) has numerous other examples found throughout Africa and Asia (and Europe?), so the loss of a single example hardly damages the evidence.

Cro-Magnon man is grouped with modern man. So what? Only Creationists find some sort of issue in that statement. When the first (partial) examples of Cro-Magnon were found, there was speculation that they were an earlier speices. With more examples, scientists recognized what they were and corrected the classifications. Only Jack Chick thinks it is wrong for science to correct its own errors.

The point of the Neandertal arthritis is typical misdirection. An early example of a Neandertal skeleton showed that it would have walked in a stooped over position, leading to all the stooped stature pictures of “cave men.” Later examination showed that the particular representative found had suffered arthritis and that Neandertal walked upright. It does not change the fact that the numerous examples of Neandertal are clearly not Homo sapiens sapiens, but Chick thinks there is some great “exposé” in showing that an early guess at stature had an explanation in an illness.

So, even when Chick is technically “correct” he lies about what he claims was wrong.

Haeckel didn’t know how easy he had it! Now that we have electron microscopes, scientists have to painstakingly CARVE gill slits into every embryo they image, just to keep the hoax alive! It’s a total pain in the ass, but scientists say it’s worth it to trick people into believing in evolution.

Hmmm

A quick Google search for “Jack Chick Dishonest” returns 520 hits, whereas searching for “Jack Chick Truthful” returns 584, so he must be telling the truth; the numbers don’t lie.

Oh wait, I’ve just noticed that where “truthful” is highlighted in all the Google result summaries, it’s prefixed with “un” or “not”.